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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Considering what we see of her in shows set during the Rebellion, that sounds incredibly boring. Who's going to tune in to a series about a sheltered 1%-er politician clutching her pearls every five minutes because the rest of the Rebellion actually wants to fight the Empire not bury it in sternly worded letters of protest? Absolutely they can. Absolutely they do. Princess Leia Organa, Hera Syndulla, Ahsoka Tano, Ursa Wren, and many others in Star Wars attest to that fact. Mon Mothma's just, y'know, not one. Like Duchess Satine from The Clone Wars, she's presented as a painfully naive and sheltered idealist so out of touch with reality that her own faction regards her as a liability and an obstacle to be worked around not as someone to take guidance from. The actual rebel leaders don't respect her. We see that many times, in Andor, in Rebels, and even after the war in Ahsoka. She's a figurehead who doesn't realize she's just a figurehead. The token politician from the deposed government the rebels keep around so they can claim to be a continuation of the previous government in exile. Even then, she wasn't their first choice... they had the vastly more effective Bail Organa in their corner before A New Hope.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    After a chaotic period at work forced me to step back from translating, I'm back on the Master File train. Past a certain point, it starts to feel a bit weird seeing so many publications rave about how amazing and successful the VF-11 Thunderbolt was when its one major appearance in the anime (Macross 7) treated it like it was ineffectual and undercapable. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-22 Sturmvogel II blows more smoke up the VF-11's arse, talking about it being essentially The Perfect Valkyrie of the 2030s and the most-produced Valkyrie of all time. I guess the QF-4000 Ghost is what's standing between the VF-171 and that title. It feels a bit funny to look at the VF-11 and then see a book say it has no obvious flaws. Master File's take is that the VF-11 was apparently SO perfect that more than 30,000 of the bloody things were made and that the military apparently considered themselves to be set until ~2060. The idea of using Gallium in a structural material is a bit insane too. The VF-22's flexible skin is said to be a Gallium-based compose called "Galom-Alpha" (feeling a bit Gundam?) made from woven hypercarbon fiber sheeting soaked in this Galom-Alpha non-newtonian metallic composite fluid and then wrapped in a bunch of different film layers that keep it warm (and pliable) and provide protection from various hazards. There's also a mention in the VF-22 book of a similar technology to the energy cartridge system that shows up in the VF-31AX book. They describe an emergency power system that uses burning hydrogen-doped metal cartridges to feed a small capacitor bank and provide electrical power in the case of a loss of generator access. The VF-31AX book had described something similar for powering the beam gunpod. The FAST pack section has what I think may be the only mention Macross has of a macron gun AKA a "dust gun". Basically, particle accelerator that fires a stream of elemental or larger particles instead of elementary particles. It's described as being kind of a side effect of an attempt to create a fusion-pumped laser cannon with a power output of several hundred megawatts but the laser beam ends up pushing the heavy metal particles used as a gain medium out at near lightspeed thanks to the GIC confinement used to focus the beam. Nasty nasty weapon.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Sounds like they've gone to quite extraordinary lengths to make the second season a suitable lead in to Rogue One. That said, I'm hoping we see a LOT less of Mon Mothma unless the writers have finally resigned themselves to making her matter to the story. The story's past the point where it needs the Rebellion's obstructive bureaucrat to complain about the heroes getting results.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Ameku M.D. has served up another glorious trainwreck this week. On the one hand, it's surprising that any studio or production committee looked at this amateur hour screenplay and said "Yeah, that's good enough for a TV anime". On the other, it's weirdly impressive how consistent its awfulness is. Its author is supposedly a doctor, but crafted a "medical mystery" story so wildly unbelievable and unscientific that it feels more like a Japanese House MD fanfic than anything.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yeah... that's the expected result. Harmony Gold officially pulled the plug on new Robotech development 18 years ago in the wake of the Shadow Chronicles debacle. Their last gasp attempt to get their fans to put up the cash for new development on Kickstarter ended 10 1/2 years ago. They even struck out re-attempting their 90's strategy of blindly farming the license out to anyone who'd cut them a check because the one publisher willing to touch it mainly just reprinted old comics and ran one new comic that was mostly a piss-take... and even that was cancelled without notice under mysterious and unspecified circumstances. There's a page quote from Warhammer 40,000's rulebook... "Success is commemorated; failure is merely remembered." Probably, yeah. The franchise's main value is squatting on the Macross license and associated trademarks, which let them collect royalties from Big West in select markets. They could almost certainly get good money for it, but they seem to be content with whatever small amount of royalties they get from Macross licensing instead.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    As worried as I am about Sunrise doing this one, the one part I have absolutely complete confidence in is that they'll once again pick an amazing performer to be the lead singer. 😀
  7. Seto Kaiba
    This has been really polarizing simulcast season for me... I've found a few really good shows that I'm absolutely loving, but the rest of the shows I've picked up have steadily been trending towards "garbage". Blue Exorcist... eech... either I somehow forgot how bad the writing got in the original manga or the adaptation to anime really allowed the suck to flourish and bloom. They've now spent nine entire episodes on a flashback to the Blue Night, which have varied from painfully dull to unintentionally hilarious when they're all meant to be tense and dramatic. Evil flying babies, anyone? Honestly, the worst is any scene involving the twins mother Yuri Egin... she's the most frustrating character in the show by far, with her imbecilic naivete leading her to unwittingly shape the story's main villain (Satan) from nonsentience into a supremely malevolent monster. Still having a LOT of fun with I'm Getting Married to a Girl I Hate in My Class, OKITSURA, and I Want to Escape from Princess Lessons. My watch group started Ascendance of a Bookworm recently too... a nice touch since I recently finished the light novel. It's weird watching it and being able to pick out all of the foreshadowing going on now. That one's getting a new season next year that'll go into Part III (of V) of the light novel too, which should be wild.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Not quite? Many models of Variable Fighter including the VF-1 Valkyrie inherited their names from older models of fighter, bomber, etc. used by real world militaries. The VF-1 is named for the North American XB-70 Valkyrie supersonic bomber. (Hikaru even has a model of one in his quarters in DYRL?.) Other examples include: There are a few cases of VFs with explicitly mythological names, but those are all much rarer and most are fairly recent. Some were chosen by fans as part of a contest, while others were riffing on the names of previous models with inherited military names.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Considering she's 71 and has a whopping 44 years as a producer and 12 as President and CEO of Disney LucasFilm to her name... nobody'd blame her if she actually took a full retirement. It's a hell of a career. If she were being forced out, it'd be something like what happened to Carlos Tavares last December. No advance notice, no talk of choosing a successor, just "We've decided to part ways" and an immediate and unfilled vacancy. (Not that anyone will miss Carlos.) Yeah, the brainrotted culture warriors aren't exactly ones for little things like perspective.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Not that I can see. The series is supposed to start its broadcast run on April 8th (about 40 days hence at time of writing), but nothing on ANN or their official website about who's going to be carrying the series in western markets. I'd assume it's going to be Crunchyroll. They've had a lock on the simulcast streaming rights to new Gundam shows for over a decade now. The one exception being Requiem for Vengeance, which went to Netflix because Netflix bankrolled its production in exchange for the worldwide streaming rights. They'll probably announce it when they start to roll out the Spring 2025 simulcast schedule.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    That is a huge improvement. I get what they were going for with their original choice of music, in terms of its thematic and symbolic meaning, but in terms of selling the show they should've just stuck with the score from the first season.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not planning to... I can't get past how fugly the designs are, and what's been revealed about the scenario doesn't really thrill me either. It's not without potential, but it feels too much like the center of a venn diagram of Gihren's Greed and G-Witch for me to care. I'll give it a fair shake when it comes out on streaming but I'm not going to pay actual money to see it in a theater.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    That is, if anything, the most perfect and hilarious outcome to this discussion we could have asked for. 🤣 👍
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Seemed like a safe bet to me, TBH. After all, Andor was/is the one Star Wars title on Disney+ that avoided the two main stumbling blocks of Disney+ Star Wars: Fan Writers and Force Users.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that's evidence that they learned from last season's rough start. Instead of a two-episode opener where all the action is in episode three, they're just going to drop an entire story arc at a time.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    I'm an engineer, mate... don't threaten me with a good time. 😜 Put simply, the people in charge of developing and producing these shows and movies are the ones responsible when those shows and movies are received poorly. That seems pretty straightforward, IMO. Blaming Kathleen Kennedy for all of Star Wars's issues is like blaming the CEO of McDonalds when your local McD's gets your order wrong. Yeah, the person responsible and the person you're blaming are in the same general organization... but they're almost completely uninvolved with each other on a day-to-day basis. I'm not saying you can't be happy about it, I'm just saying it doesn't make logical sense and won't actually change anything because Kennedy was never the one making those "bad" creative decisions to begin with.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Like I've said previously, LucasFilm's problem is that the studio is bringing in talented people with thoroughly respectable creative credentials as producers, directors, and writers to helm these new Star Wars projects... and a fair few of these people are turning in crap work. The "why", I assume, varies widely. Whether it's because they're promoted fans who're too in love with Star Wars to write anything but bad fan fiction, too afraid of being tarred and feathered for "failing" Star Wars to take creative risks, or cynically chasing a proposal that sounded like something fans already like... the work these showrunners and writers and directors with excellent credentials are doing just isn't striking a chord with the target audience. Kathleen Kennedy is just the LucasFilm CEO and President. She has probably half a dozen layers of management between her and anyone who's actually making anything like a creative decision. It's not like she's micromanaging every single thing the company does. There aren't that many hours in the day. Let go of the culture war brainrot.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    See? This is a perfect example of Star Wars fans irrational desire to blame Kathleen Kennedy for anything and everything even when it makes no sense at all. Now Kathleen Kennedy's supposedly to blame for the failure of the Star Trek soft reboot movies... even though Star Trek and Star Trek: Into Darkness were both completed before Abrams left to work on Star Wars. Both films were financial failures that underperformed at the box office and brought in little in the way of merchandising revenue. Paramount's attempt to reboot Star Trek was already a commercial failure well before Abrams departed and Star Trek: Beyond simply continued that downward trend by continuing to do all of the same things that already hadn't been working with Abrams in the director's seat. Kathleen Kennedy owns no part of that failure. That is ALL Paramount and Bad Robot, and arguably mostly Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci's belief that they needed to make Star Trek "less Star Trek-y" for the movie to be marketable.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    You'll never be able to unsee it once you realize the Aerial Knights are set up with the same style and tropes as the main characters from Ouran High School Host Club. 🤣 I know I can't.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Yep. I'm mostly there for the VF-171s, truth be told. It's a quirky little Macross Delta prequel, but much less impactful and relevant than The White Knight of the Black Wing. THAT one should really have been a flashback episode of the TV series proper.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    That's not Kathleen Kennedy "ruining" Star Wars, though. Kathleen Kennedy aggressively pursued a producer/director/writer with an at-the-time quite respectable CV, a stack of industry awards, and experience writing and directing both sci-fi and action titles. They were even poaching him from the other big American sci-fi franchise. From a business perspective, it surely looked like an absolute win. She hired a top writer-director who then proceeded to fumble the bag by producing a very safe and unremarkable sequel that triggered a panicky attempt to rework the story on the fly to win back fans who were never going to accept the sequel trilogy anyway. She hired people with good credentials and experience and a fair number of those people just did sh*t work.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    If the pattern continues, the next blame figure is LL... ... ... in hindsight, it's a shame Disney bought Marvel and not DC. The next LucasFilm head would be in real danger of dating Superman.🤪
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Neat. I'mma go see that for sure. 😁
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Nah. Kathleen Kennedy's just a convenient blame figure for the Star Wars fans who buy into culture war BS. She's the studio president and CEO, FFS. It's not like she's in charge of development of new Star Wars stories herself. Even if she were, it's weird how fans only ever want to credit her with the stuff they don't like... as if fan-favorites like The Clone Wars seasons 5-7, Rogue One, Rebels, The Mandalorian, Ahsoka, and Andor weren't all made during her tenure too. The blame for Star Wars's struggles under Disney rests farther down the chain of command with promoted fans writing fanfic-tier material and the studio's self-defeating goal of trying to satisfy die-hard fans determined to hate anything it does and appeal to general audiences at the same time. It won't change a bloody thing. Assuming LucasFilm has a relatively normal corporate organization, there are probably at least three and more likely five to seven layers of management between Kennedy's role and anyone doing any actual creative work. The janitors cleaning the office space are probably more closely involved in the creative workflow than Kennedy or her replacement.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Tried to get clever with the music for the trailer... but otherwise it looks like more or less exactly what we've been promised. The "The Revolution will not be civilized" years of the Rebellion that Cassian talks about in Rogue One.
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